Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) introduced his bill to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank’s charter Wednesday evening without a controversial provision to roll back the bank’s restrictions on financing overseas coal plants.

After initially pushing language of the bill with the provision, which blocks guidelines the bank implemented in December that prevent funding of coal plants abroad unless they adopt carbon capture technology, Manchin opted to propose the measure as a separate amendment.

NRG Energy has some outside-the-box views of the energy industry. Now it’s following along with stodgy, old-school Southern Company on the carbon capture front, though. Maybe this carbon capture thing is a real possibility after all.

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Big trouble or big opportunityIf Southern Company’s results are any indication, NRG Energy and its shareholders could be in for a rough ride trying to deploy this largely untested technology. In 2013, Southern Company dinged shareholders for $0.83 a share for Kemper cost overruns. Add in the $0.27 a share charge in the first quarter and shareholders have $1.10 a share worth of reasons to dislike carbon capture technology.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently proposed new carbon emission standards for fossil fuel power plants under the Clean Air Act (CAA). The rules for new-build power plants fall under Section 111(b) and are known as the New Source Performance Standards (NSPS). This should not be confused with Section 111(d) that regulates existing power plants. The NSPS for coal power plants are controversial because they require the use of partial Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) technology that has not been deployed to date absent government funding.

The Alberta government has been “off its game” for years when it comes to climate change policy, Tory leadership candidate Jim Prentice said Wednesday as he dismissed carbon capture and storage as a science experiment and called for a beefed-up environment department.

On Tuesday, auditor general Merwan Saher issued a scathing report that found under Alberta’s climate change plan, the government is missing its greenhouse gas reduction targets, hasn’t regularly monitored the plan’s results and has yet to publish a single document on its outcomes.

A fresh effort to store pollutants underground

FOR more than 30 years Peterhead power station has churned out electricity from a windswept spot on the north-east coast of Scotland. Its chimney (pictured) is a familiar landmark for strollers on Aberdeen’s chilly beach. Yet soon the ageing gas-fired plant could host a crucial experiment. Engineers from Shell, an oil firm, and SSE, an energy company, plan to add technology that will capture the carbon dioxide which billows from Peterhead’s furnace and store it in a depleted gasfield more than a mile beneath the North Sea. That could cut its emissions by up to 90%, making Peterhead by far the cleanest gas plant in the world.

As a further consideration, because carbon sequestration technology remains developmental and pilot projects and other facility-level testing is ongoing, the performance levels of such technology and projects cannot be known with a high level of predictability. (page 5)

Likewise, his EPA’s proposed New Source Performance Standards, released last year, place a de facto ban on the construction of new cutting-edge clean-coal plants; jeopardizing America’s leadership in developing Carbon Capture and Storage technology and ceding an estimated $1 trillion in economic benefits resulting from the technology to countries like China.

The premature shutdown of coal and nuclear power plants is sobering evidence that some parts of the country could face an electric power crisis.

New England is especially hard put to keep up with the demand for electricity from industrial and commercial customers who need “big data” to stay competitive. In the last three decades, computing speeds have risen more than 200,000-fold, but there is scant awareness of the enormous amount of electricity needed to power the digital revolution. Thousands of data centers are being built across the country, each needing as much electricity as a large factory.